Blegen Position
Every year the department appoints a Blegen Distinguished Visiting Research Professor or the Blegen Research Fellow. The Blegen scholar spends his/her year pursuing research and lecturing on his or her scholarly concerns in classical antiquity. Each Blegen Lecture Course is a unique offering that allows students to study aspects of the Classical World that are not taught by standing members of the department.
The 2011/2012 Blegen Visitor and Course
Guest: Matthew Wright, Senior Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History, University of Exeter
Course: The Comedian as Critic (offered in the Spring semester)
In this course we shall examine the fascinating, tantalizing remains of Athenian comedy from the fifth century BC – including not only Aristophanes but also some less familiar playwrights such as Hermippus, Eupolis, Cratinus, Platon and Metagenes. These texts will be studied in relation to their original theatrical and social context, but students will also be introduced to a variety of different approaches to comedy and humour, including modern literary and cultural theory as well as ancient literary criticism. Students will be encouraged to compare and contrast ancient Greek comic drama with other forms of comedy, and to reflect on ways in which ancient drama can help us to think about modern literature and culture.
The genre of comedy can be approached in numerous ways, but at the centre of this course is the idea of the comedian as critic. One of the most important functions of comedy is to criticize and comment on the contemporary world. The targets of fifth-century comic criticism include political figures, current affairs, religion and ritual, intellectual developments, and (above all) other poets and their work. Through close study of individual plays and fragments (in translation), we shall focus on topics such as the relationship between elite and popular culture in Athens, the state-run dramatic festivals and their paraphernalia, the problems of performance criticism, the phenomenon of the literary or cultural prize, the nature and purpose of political satire, the idea of utopia, ‘the shock of the new’, the challenges posed by the sophists, and the birth of literary criticism.
Blegen courses from recent years
Women in Greek and Roman Theater
2010/11 John Starks
Women, such as Clytemnestra, Medea, Helen, Hekabe, Lysistrata, and Cleostrata, are among the most interesting characters developed for the ancient stage. We will look at them as entertaining and stimulating visions of the feminine and unfeminine, as perceived by the cultures that originally watched them and in our own day. This course approaches Greek and Roman dramatic scripts, both comic (Aristophanes, Plautus) and tragic (Aeschylus, Euripides, Seneca), as vehicles for presentation of social norms and anomalies at public festivals and for general entertainment. As public works, these texts offer us a chance to investigate gender issues and social mores as presented by actors. We will also examine and practice theater techniques to better understand the presentation of females by actors, and we will discuss the venues and genres in which actresses played female characters to note the differences gender makes in perception of character and in their real lives as working women. Students will gain familiarity with these plays and characters through ample script analysis, discussion, performance, theoretical readings, and oral and written presentations of original work. Every alternate session will focus on an actual play OR an ancient theater topic, such as staging, masks, festivals, actors and actresses’ lives, and other theatrical history source material.
Greek and Roman Religion
2009/10 Lora Holland
What does it mean to have a pantheon of gods? How do mythology and religion differ? What did the ancient Greeks and Romans believe, since their religions were not revealed, and they produced no doctrinal or liturgical texts? Using a wide range of sources, including literary texts, archaeological evidence, and visual texts, such as coins and paintings, this courses addresses the historical, cultural and social significance of both public and private worship in Greece and Rome, with some discussion of Bronze Age Greece, the Etruscans, and the emergence of Christianity during the Roman Empire.
An Introduction to Indo-European Linguistics
2008/09 Angelo Mercado
Many modern languages, including English, are “sisters” in a family of languages we call “Indo-European.” Although we have no documents written in their “mother” tongue, linguists have been able to reconstruct many aspects of Proto-Indo-European by working backwards from early languages in the family like Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin. This course explores the different features of language—phonology, morphology, syntax, for example—that allow us to reconstruct a completely extinct language, as well as features of its literature and culture. We examine how linguistic theory guides this reconstruction and what we learn about the form of language in general by looking back from living languages to “dead” languages to languages whose existence we can only deduce. Some knowledge of Greek, Latin, Sanskrit or another Indo-European language, or of linguistic theory, is advantageous but not required.
Food in the ancient Mediterranean world
2007/08 Rosemary Moore
This seminar examines the uses and meanings of food within ancient Greek and Roman societies. Food for the Greeks and Romans was not simply a means of sustenance, but a vehicle for cultural constructions of morality and mores. In addition, patterns of food consumption and the means for production and distribution reveal fundamental aspects of societal organization. Readings for this course are drawn from scholarship in many disciplines, but primarily history and anthropology. Selected topics include the role of food in medicine and philosophy, social rank, conspicuous consumption, and food production.
How do the Mute Stones Speak? Commemorating the Dead in Ancient Greece
2006/7 Celina Gray
In modern society, death and commemoration have been pushed out of the public realm except in the case of large-scale tragedies, as is apparent when the public is called upon to mark public tragedies such as 9/11, Oklahoma City, the Vietnam War and the Holocaust. But private grief and the realities of dying remain taboo issues in today’s sanitized America. In no other moment in Western history has death played such a prominent and complex role as in antiquity, where death and the dead were omnipresent. Funeral orations, women’s lamentations, funeral pyres, public military graves, road-side burials, elaborate extramural tombs, cults of the dead and the proliferation of funerary images on public and private art saturated the ancient city and landscape. The idealized memory and the physical reality of death were a significant part of everyday life. The omnipresence of the deceased in public and private life was possible through the sophisticated negotiation between words (spoken and written) and images (on private funerary monuments and painted vases). In this seminar we will consider funerary ritual and the role of the dead in antiquity. Seminar topics will include ancient Greek funerary statues and epigrams,
The role of the dead in ancient magic and cult, portrayals of the dead in Athenian tragedy, state control of ancient funerary rituals, modern funerary practices, the development of the 19th century Romantic cemetery and the debates surrounding the future of The World Trade Center in New York City.
Seers, Sages, Philosophers: Figures of Wisdom in Archaic and Classical Greece
2005/06 Bruce King
This course focuses upon the earliest exemplars of wisdom in Archaic Greece (and south Italy) and places them in a context in which religious thought was not yet sharply distinguished from philosophical thought, and in which mystical experience was not yet separable from the idea of the philosophical life. We begin by considering the “way of life” of Pythagoras, as we are able to reconstruct it from the disparate sources; special attention is paid to Pythagoras’ legendary role as a law-giver and as the founder of a philosophical community; comparison of Pythagoras and his community to the legends and cosmogonies of Orpheus and his celebrants is also central to our study. Following the break-up of the South-Italian Pythagorean communities, we follow the itinerant tracks of those wisdom figures especially associated with Pythagoras: close study of the fragments of Empedokles, Parmenides, Xenophanes, and Philolaos. Finally, we consider the figure of Sokrates, both as an heir to and contestant of the Pythagorean tradition: close reading of the Phaedo and the Timaeus. Throughout our study, we give sustained attention to comparative traditions of metempsychosis, shamanism, and theories of astral and cosmic immortality.
Romans, Greeks, and Jews
2004/2005 Claude Eilers
Toleration and its Alternatives in the late Republic and early Empire. The Jews of the Graeco-Roman world occasionally enjoyed self-rule of various degrees, but more typically they found themselves ruled by others; for Jews of the Diaspora, the communities in which they lived exhibited attitudes that range from tolerance to active oppression. How is this to be understood politically? religiously: culturally? And how did their experience compare to other minorities? These questions are explored through documents preserved in literary, epigraphical, and papyrological contexts.
Biography and Scandal
2003/2004 Jaqueline Long
This cross-cultural seminar explores the pleasures of biography, focusing especially on the late-antique collection of imperial biographies known as the Historia Augusta. How do the Lives of state leaders draw our, readers', interest? How do rulers' lives inform ours, so that their biographies map a heritage we share? How do researched fact and imagined re(-)creation intersect when Lives are told? The Historia Augusta combines sober truths with unbridled fancies in various ways concerning emperors ranging in time from Hadrian to Cams and his sons and in character from Marcus Aurelius to Elagabalus. Scandal and humor periodically spice both the facts and the inventions. We endeavor to recover a sense of what these Lives meant to late antique Roman readers, concerned with their Roman heritage in a changing world, by studying them in conjunction with selections from important Classical models of biography.
On Nature: Ideas of the Natural in Ancient Rome
2002/2003 Garth Tissol
What is nature and what does it mean to call something "natural"? People today who write about environment often use these terms intuitively, without reflecting on their origins and deeper significance. But in fact the concept of the natural has had a long history, with many paths and byways this history has shaped current understandings of nature and of the place of human beings in it. This course has two related aims: first, to study the evolution of conceptions of nature in the western tradition, beginning with the ancient Greek philosophy, and moving through Roman philosophy and literature second, to examine the imaginative and poetic responses to the natural world that distinguish Roman literature. The major texts of the course are Lucretius' On the Nature of Things, Vergil's Eclogues, and Ovid's Metamorphoses. We also read selections from earlier writings - the presocratic philosophers and Aristotle - and from later ones, including Pliny's Natural History and Seneca's Natural Questions.
East and West
2001/2002 Carolyn Dewald
This course reads epics from the ancient Eastern andWestern traditions: the Bhavagad Gita and portions of the Mahabharata from the Indian subcontinent, and the Iliad from archaic Greece. We explore some of the different ways that war and the nature of the personal achievement of the warrior are problematized in the two ancient epic traditions, and then consider the larger issues underlying the meeting of east and west as Herodotus, the fifth century Greek historian, defined them. Is Herodotus an unequivocal supporter of Greek individual initiative and the warrior culture of the Greek polis, or is he tacitly seeing some of the merits in the (unsuccessful) Persian way of organizaing ad thinking aobut things? As background, we also read a modern dialogue between a contemporary French philosopher and Buddhist monk (who happen to be father and son).
Sport, Society, and Politics in the Roman World
2000/2001 Geoff Sumi
This course examines the complex phenomenon of public entertainment in Roman society against a backdrop of social and political history. We begin with a discussion of political and social institutions in Rome, including the Roman family, the roles of men and women in roman society, slavery and manumission, and life in the city. The core component of the course is a discussion of spectacles in Roman society, not only as entertainment but also as a form of social control and a forum for the dissemination of propaganda and political symbols. Among the spectacles we consider are the gladiatorial combats and wild beast shows that took place in the Colosseum and the chariot races of the Circus Maximus. In connection with these we study the evidence for the careers of individual entertainers (gladiators, charioteers, and actors), who, though they were mostly slaves or otherwise d class (e.g. literary texts, inscriptions, and papyri) as well as works of modern scholarship.